It has grown, and I’ve grown along with it
Some backstory
Dear readers, new and old:
As I mentioned at the end of the newsletter last week, there are now over 1,000 of you! I am simply over the moon to have you all here, and as promised, I’d like to share a little bit about myself and Pinch of Dirt.
This newsletter started as a teeny tiny personal project in 2017, and the first issue went out to just over a half-dozen close friends and family. At the time, I was working as the managing editor of a civic tech news site (RIP Civicist), writing and editing stories about the intersection of technology, politics, and society. It was my first full-time job in journalism (that wasn’t an internship) and I loved it and learned a lot. But I had started to question whether I wanted to write about either technology or politics in the long run. In fact, I was pretty sure I wanted to write about the environment.
You see, I had been bit by the hiking bug. On a weekend trip to visit a college friend in North Carolina in 2014, I borrowed a copy of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (I know! Such a cliché) and tore through it in a day, staying up late after my friend and her girlfriend (now wife) had gone to bed to finish. I was enchanted. I spent the winter diving into the minutiae of ultralight hiking online (which to this day I have not mastered, and in fact, have probably gotten worse at) and went on my first solo backpacking trip on Memorial Day weekend the following year.
In 2016, I hiked the Long Trail, the nation’s oldest long distance trail, which crosses the entirety of Vermont from Massachusetts to the Canadian border. It was hard and wonderful. Maybe it didn’t change me in essentials, not on its own, but it was part of a long process of transformation, of becoming who I am now (which feels, in retrospect, obvious and inevitable, but surely it wasn’t, not necessarily).
I like to pin my desire to write about the environment and the outdoors to that hike, because it is narratively neat, but really my desire to go on a long hike and to change my “beat” as a writer and reporter were simply coalescing at the same time.
In any case, I began thinking about what was next, and the next year I launched Pinch of Dirt. It started as a news roundup, sharing links to the best things I had read that week that somehow touched on outdoor adventure, nature/the wild, or the environment. Eventually, I had enough confidence to start writing a bit about my own experiences in nature and the outdoors.
I feel Pinch of Dirt has changed very little in essence over the years, except for the fact that it has grown, and I’ve grown along with it. I often write about my hiking adventures at length and in great detail. I have dallied with gift guides, book essays, reviews of trail journals, and, most recently, film criticism. I commissioned and edited four wonderful guest essays this year (one is still to come). And I still often share links to recent nature, outdoor adventure, and climate/environment stories that I enjoyed or found noteworthy.
I have waffled greatly over how and where to categorize my newsletter on Substack. Does it belong in Climate & Environment or in Travel? Would it belong in a Nature category, if such a thing were ever created? These things—climate, the environment, nature, and our experience living and moving through of all of the above—seem inextricably connected to me, in this newsletter as in life.
So that’s who I am and what Pinch of Dirt is! I think my tagline still sums it up well: “A little of the outdoors in your inbox.” Succinct, but expansive.
Also, while most of the posts are free to all, paid subscribers give me that little boost of encouragement to keep going (and help pay for guest essays and other fun things). And there’s a little sale going on for the rest of August, in honor of my birthday month: 20 percent off for eternity.
If you’ve been reading for a while and like what you see, I hope you’ll consider it. Paid subscribers can also access posts older than a year. If you want to delve into past hiking adventures (on the Cohos Trail, for example), read my marathon essay, or revisit the first issues in the Pinch of Dirt archives (the stories I linked to are still bangers, although the formatting may be a little wonky), that’s a good first step. Could be fun!